It’s too late for these teachers to learn from their mistakes

Any mother who has been transformed into a screaming virago while trying, yet again, to get their seven-year-old to grasp the concept of number bonds (mea culpa) understands the value of a good teacher.

Actually, not even necessarily a good one, just a reasonable one who is patient and possesses a modicum of common sense. So what to make of the teacher who terrified primary school pupils in Kent by announcing in assembly that following “an incident”, they were being taken away and might never see their parents again?

Or the deputy head in Scotland who assigned “porn star” names to dozens of mortified teenagers?

He’d fed their real names into a website which generated crude versions. Hilarious, maybe, if you’re all 15 and sniggering about “Dirk Peachybutt” behind the bike shed. Excruciatingly juvenile when an authority figure reads them out in an assembly.

What in the name of Mr Chips was Graeme Cowie, 38, thinking? The answer is: he wasn’t. He now faces being struck off, which will give him plenty of time to reconsider his (fnarr, fnarr) position.

Meanwhile in Kent, some not-very bright spark thought it

would be educational to give children as young as four an insight into the fear and panic of child refugees. Too right it did; weepy and scared, the kids were petrified. Job done.

Fortunately, it took place before Monday’s bomb in Manchester. All the same, it was an idiotic, witless and completely counterproductive thing to do.

Children are more tenderhearted, less inured to man’s inhumanity to man, far less cynical than grown-ups. They don’t need to have adult cruelties rammed in their faces.

Finally, to the headlines generated by teaching assistant Caroline Hannigan, 56, who stole money from a school charity box to pay off her son’s drug dealer, who had threatened his life.

She admitted her misdemeanour, was given a reprimand and allowed to return to the classroom. I wish her well and I hope her son gets the help he needs.

Utter desperation and crass stupidity are two very different propositions, and should be judged, and punished, accordingly.